Flickr take over by Smug
 

Well Smug have finally shown their true colours. Very disappointed.

They have decided to stop the 1TB of space for the free accounts and limit it now to 1000 photos. :censored: Unless I/you/we pay $49 for the PRO account. Anything over the 1000 photos are going to get deleted some time in January I believe. I am not a pro photographer and the majority of my photos are taken with my phone.
Also quite a lot of my photos are tied in to my Ride Reports so now they will be ruined once the clowns remove about 2000 of my photos

I don't know how many others will be affected with this? But it ain't good
:censored:

Is there anything else out there where you can use free storage and put the links into your ride reports so the photos can be viewed....all my 3000 or so photos total about 1.5 Gb

Any service like that will only stay free until they think they have a critical mass of captive users (or they run out of venture capital cash).

As I said in the Photobucket thread... if you're not the one who's paying, then you are the product that is being sold.

FWIW I happily paid for Flickr Pro for years, and only stopped when they completely messed up their mass upload service and their web UI, making it difficult to group and hotlink images.

If you want to keep an archive of photos online which you can hotlink and embed elsewhere, your best bet is to get a cheap webhosting service and upload them as sorted, logically named folders and files.

Google photos is working for me.

Any company that thinks I'm paying £40 a year for something I can do with a secure hard drive and access to sites that want me to see their adverts is going to be disappointed. Account closed the day they posted the notice.

You'd have thought Smugmug would have learned from all the people they lost last time.

Same goes for banks that don't understand the three card trick is what their entire industry is based on and journalists who think I can't get the facts from people who are there and want their moment in the limelight.

Andy

I"m unclear why anyone would expect to be eternally provided with web storage space for their files. It seems to me wise to expect that sooner or later you're going to pay for such a service--and this certainly includes Google, who did not become one of the world's largest companies by giving stuff away free of obligation.

So: if it's free you should expect limits, changes, fees, or (at minimum) collection of personal information which will be sold around the world at significant peril to you, the humble photographer. Even if you pay for your storage, it's wise to expect prices or access to change once they've got you hooked. This way you might be pleasantly surprised from time to time, but you won't waste any energy getting offended when companies do as they are designed to do.

So am I missing something crucial about this?

Mark

Yep its the way to go, webhosting is so cheap nowadays & its so easy to upload to the server via FTP into organised folders, been doing this for over a decade now.

Mezo.

I bought enough storage for a lifetime at a high street shop for £50. Assuming I live as long as most that's £1.20 a year. Add a bit of admin and inflation and let's call it £2 a year. If they can't make that and a decent profit in advertising there is something wrong. A 2000% margin is taking the ****. Forcing up their costs by collecting a direct payment must be more than the storage costs.

They should remember, this service is a convenience not something I need.

I can live with limits and adverts, but when it becomes intrusive I drop them and they make nothing. Its like when local phone calls are charged or premium rates are used, I find someone else with a different business model. Even the King of this, Apple is now starting to realise even its most addicted customers won't stand for £400 headphones etc.

Andy

That's the lifetime of that hard drive. And you have to bring the hard drive and your laptop with you when you want to show the photos to anyone.

Online photo storage services offer multiple redundancy on the backend, plus the ability to share them easily. If that's not enough of a valuable use case to you, that's fair enough - but there's a reason they cost money, and there's a reason people pay for them.

Google Photos is okay, not perfect in terms of sharing, but not terrible; their free tier runs out quite quickly though. I'm paying for the 100TB tier and it's fine for now, but I'm afraid it won't take my entire Flickr archive without some lubrication.

It would have been better if they would have come in with a tiered price rather than a pay nearly $50 or loose all your photos apart from 1000. I don't think its been thought through very well, most other groups like Google, Dropbox, Apple and others give you free space and then tiered pricing. I and probably 1000's of others don't need unlimited space as a PRO